Valve is just hedging against Microsoft having a big red button to kill Steam. They've built their kingdom on top of Microsoft, and Microsoft would love to have it for themselves I'm sure. It's in Valve's best interest to divorce themselves from Windows to protect themselves from Microsoft.
It happens to also benefit the Linux gaming crowd, but it's still ultimately self-interest driving the work. The engineers doing the work are probably doing it for the altruistic reasons, but ultimately Valve is writing the cheques.
Sure, but Qualcomm upstreaming their support to mainline would also have broad benefits for them and be a win-win.
Their C-suits & bean counters are seemingly just not getting that themselves nor having anyone that knows that high enough the hierachy...
From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."
They've been upstreaming drivers for the X2 platform for months at this point, since at least late 2025 (just search "glymur" or "kaanapali" on LKML).
The patch referenced in the Phoronix article is just a device tree file. That is the easiest part of the whole thing. As usual he's just farming every random LKML patch he can for clicks.
The open source world has a habit of leaving the easiest part of the whole thing unfinished for years or decades, so I salute this patch and I salute Phoronix for calling attention to it.
I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.
apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).
it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.
Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!
And here I was hoping they'd decided to support Linux on the Snapdragon X2 chips.
When will folks learn companies only support Linux or any other FOSS to the extent their own business goals?
None of them are on the game for the well being of the community or whatever.
Profits and lower R&D costs, that is all.
Wouldn't you say that Valve is an exception to that rule?
Not at all, they don't want to pay for Windows licenses, as seen there is very little incentive to actually support native Linux games.
Additionally they want to prevent losing Steam content to Windows Store or XBox PC App.
If they could get Windows source at zero cost, like the Netbook OEMs did in the early days, they would quickly forget about Linux.
Additionally, don't forget current Valve's management doesn't live forever like any of us, and who knows what will happen to Valve afterwards.
Valve is just hedging against Microsoft having a big red button to kill Steam. They've built their kingdom on top of Microsoft, and Microsoft would love to have it for themselves I'm sure. It's in Valve's best interest to divorce themselves from Windows to protect themselves from Microsoft.
It happens to also benefit the Linux gaming crowd, but it's still ultimately self-interest driving the work. The engineers doing the work are probably doing it for the altruistic reasons, but ultimately Valve is writing the cheques.
No, I think Valve prioritizing an open platform independent of Microsoft aligns with their business goals.
They’re doing it in a manner that has broad benefits, but it’s definitely a win-win situation.
Sure, but Qualcomm upstreaming their support to mainline would also have broad benefits for them and be a win-win. Their C-suits & bean counters are seemingly just not getting that themselves nor having anyone that knows that high enough the hierachy...
Qualcomm aims to sue and monopolize so no sharing is caring for them. They want control.
It's happening: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HP-EliteBook-X-G2q-Linux
From the June 4th article: "These patches are a result of a collaboration between a couple of Qualcomm engineers taking part in an internal sprint and were created over 3 days."
it's not giving me any warm and fuzzy.
They've been upstreaming drivers for the X2 platform for months at this point, since at least late 2025 (just search "glymur" or "kaanapali" on LKML).
The patch referenced in the Phoronix article is just a device tree file. That is the easiest part of the whole thing. As usual he's just farming every random LKML patch he can for clicks.
The open source world has a habit of leaving the easiest part of the whole thing unfinished for years or decades, so I salute this patch and I salute Phoronix for calling attention to it.
Point well taken.
holy hell.. the price tags...!
$4,300-$6,000+, wow you're not wrong. And that's just 32 or 64 GB of RAM.
Something has gone wrong at HP. They are also charging $7,000 for Strix Halo.
HP is nuts
HPE I've had very good luck with for HCI.
I have a gorgeous Surface Pro 11 X1 Elite that can run just enough Linux to tease me with how beautiful it could be, but it's still unstable enough that I can't daily it.
Torture.
It's really that weak?
I recently tried to get BSD/Linux to work on my omnibook X 14 and... it's been a journey!
Eventually I got it to work well with [1] and extracted firmware off github because I had wiped Windows and all partitions into oblivion.
I was looking for the bliss of fan-less linux with ARM. The joy! [2]
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-concept-snapdragon-x-e...
[2] the fans are ON permanently
If you want fanless arm linux machine, why not macbook m2 air + asahi linux ?
apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).
it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.
pertinent references :
https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
or search for UTM on the Apple app store, where it's prebuilt (and that's what i use successfully).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate, etc.
Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.
It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.
Asahi is like a decade away from being 100% tho
It is sad to see that they still do not support Snapdragon products with Linux offically as a product
Just upstream your drivers! Then you don't need Qualcomm Linux.... you just have Linux.
Why can’t upstream just take their drivers? Isn’t that the point of requiring those drivers to be GPL?
Imagine you wrote a WYSIWYG text editor, like Libre Office Writer. You have all sorts of functionality and an overall architecture which makes it sane to upkeep the project & have things work well together. Then someone else makes a custom font, but kind of does it their own way and with a different approach making it a one off from the way the rest of the fonts all work and are used in the program maybe using a custom font file format parser and different UI element even though you know it could have just used the normal, already maintained and planned out code paths.
You can of course merge anything with the right license if you so like, like that one off font code into your editor, but if it doesn't fit well into the overall project or meet the general quality standards of it then it's not practical to and can actually be worse than not including it. Upstreaming is about submitting something the maintainer can reasonably accept and maintain, not just about whether working code is available. GPL licensed code provides the latter, it's still up to someone (either the original company or some other interested person) to make it fit right first.
Upstream requires a level of quality most developers cannot meet.
The quality of the qcom code is way too low for upstream
for real
Recently bought an SBC with a QCS6490 (https://radxa.com/products/dragon/q6a/). Curious to see if the vendor winds up using this as a base.
We'll see. They purposely dropped all server/console support and now only offer a Debian desktop image, which seems crazy for an SBC. Not exactly a welcome mat:
> Other variants that were previously provided AS-IS are no longer provided. Interested users need to build those by themselves.
https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-dragon-q6a
AI / NPU use cases have been severely hampered as well:
https://gist.github.com/Foadsf/3cc2e0ed357c3ac7180589701bf83...
I've personally been wrestling with their broken I2C for a couple weeks.
Really want to love this board but lots of sharp edges at the moment. Hopefully Qualcomm keeps dedicating resources to improving things - I know it's hard work!